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Asian social marketplace TravelMob lands $1 million in seed funding

Southeast Asia-based Travelmob, a three-month-old travel-themed social marketplace, has made a good start to life after it landed $1 million in seeding funding, led by Singapore’s Jungle Ventures.

Founded by former Skype Asia MD Turochas Fuad and ex-Yahoo exec Prashant Kirtane, the fledgling service allows visitors to find and book short-term rented accommodation across Southeast Asia, using an Airbnb-meets-Hotels Tonight-type approach.

The fresh capital will be used to scale up the service’s presence and number of rentals in the region, as it seeks to capitalize on a market that is not yet covered by some of the online booking sector’s biggest names.

“Our mission is to lead the social stay market in Asia Pacific and since launch, we’ve been making tremendous progress towards that goal. Travelmob intends to use the capital from this seed round of funding to help drive further growth and expansion across the region,” Fuad said in an announcement [via e27].

The service currently has a balanced mix of customers, half of which are based outside of Asia Pacific, Fuad explained.

“Approximately 50 percent of these visitors are currently coming from within the Asia Pacific region and the remaining 50 percent from markets like the US, Europe and even Middle East. However, we are increasingly getting more intra-APAC travellers given the rise of middle income groups in India and China.”

Travelmob has also revealed that it has improved search and discovery on the site by adding ‘experience tags.’ Explained in the video below, the feature allows travellers to better locate the kind of holiday experience they seek while, likewise, hosts can highlight their listings to reach target audiences with great effect.